my ramblings on life, work & anything left in-between

CPAN Smoke Testing: An unsung hero

One of the great things about CPAN is that it runs automated smoke testing on all modules uploaded to it.

I recently implemented a small feature in my Builder module and CPAN currently informs me that my test suite as passed 63 times, failed on 7 occasasions and returned an unknown status 3 times. Here’s the current breakdown of the smoke testing matrix of these different versions of Perl & OS’es the Bulder test suite as been run on.

Seems painless enough. But it does feel like i’m sweeping the problem under the carpet a little bit!

So after a bit more Googling I found a couple of better solutions but plumped for IO::Scalar (part of IO::Stringy). I downloaded the IO::Stringy source code folder straight from CPAN and into Builder’s test directory under “lib” and amended my builder_xml_output.t file like so…

About…..

My name is Barry Walsh. I'm a freelance IT consultant from London, UK. [more]

This blog is mostly about Perl programming because this is what I use and love (and occasionally hate!) for the majority of my working (and sometimes non-working) day.

Occasionally I will touch on other subjects like PostgreSQL, Mac OSX, UNIX, Linux, Ruby, jQuery, Javascript, XML and many more techie things that I also play with regularly. Other non techie aspects of my life may slip in now and again but I'll try and keep that to a minimum because its normally boring anyway :)